Click Here & Google Pixels

Another exciting week of Internet marketing is coming to an end, and we all know what that means: it’s time for the latest edition of Gnome Likes! Here are a few of our favorite Internet marketing posts from this past week:

If you could rank every unique anchor text phrase found on the Web based on its popularity, “click here” would definitely be near the top of the list. It’s simple; it’s been around forever, and according to the fine folks at UX Movement, it’s also the worst anchor text you can use. Wait, what?

In this amazing post, Anthony T gives two compelling reasons why you should never use “click here” in your anchor text:

“Click” Puts Too Much Focus on Mouse Mechanics: You want your reader to be focused on your content and its message – not the physical act of clicking on a link.

“Here” Conceals What Users are Clicking: You don’t want your readers guessing about what they’re about to see – tell them in the anchor text!

Then, he presents a few best practices for how you should link to content on the Web:

Link to Nouns: Nouns are concrete, and they immediately provide context for readers.

Link to Specifics: Don’t make your readers guess; tell them exactly what they can expect behind that link.

End on a Link: It’s easier for a reader to click on a link when it comes at the end of a sentence (it removes the need to scan backwards to find the link).

I encourage you to read the full post for more details and concrete examples. Bottom line: stop using “click here” in your anchor text!

For more information about linking best practices, click here (that was a joke – and the link just points back to this post :-P).

I realize this title looks like absolute gibberish, but it serves a very important purpose. The author, SEO Mofo, deliberately vomited i’s and l’s all over the screen to experiment with how Google displays titles in the SERPs.

For years, it’s been an unwritten law that titles should be no longer than 70 characters to avoid being shortened by Google in the SERPs. However, this post challenges that conventional wisdom and makes the following novel observation:

Google no longer cares how many characters are in your SERP title; all it cares about now is how wide (measured in pixels) your title is.

The post’s title contains a whopping 107 characters, yet it is shown in its entirety in the Google SERP (as of the writing of this post). Clearly, characters are out, and pixels are in!

In this post, Sujan Patel lists 55 SEO tools that they use at his SEO agency, Single Grain. The tools are broken down into 8 categories:

Keyword Research

Onsite Analysis

Link Building

Rankings

PPC

Social

Project Management/Coordination

General Productivity Tools

I consider myself somewhat of an SEO tools connoisseur, and I still found tools on this list that I’ve never used before. So I definitely recommend you skim through the list and spend some time playing with these tools.

Technically, this infographic didn’t come out this week. But since I found it this week, it still made the cut 😉 It provides a nice introduction to SEO for the newbies in the audience:

Happy Friday, and enjoy your weekend!

About The Author

Steve Webb is an SEO audit specialist at Web Gnomes. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, where he published dozens of articles on Internet-related topics. Professionally, Steve has worked for Google and various other Internet startups, and he's passionate about sharing his knowledge and experiences with others. You can find him on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.